


Oncocyte

by TearoomSaloon



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ambiguous/Open Ending, F/M, Hurt, a little heartbreaking, bye, kind of dark in tone, okay a lot heartbreaking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-30
Updated: 2016-11-30
Packaged: 2018-09-03 06:10:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8700490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TearoomSaloon/pseuds/TearoomSaloon
Summary: He had gotten under her skin, much as she had expected him to.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Things changed: ages and setting. There is a one-year difference. The opening is implied to be under Luke's training.

“He’s just trying to get under your skin,” said the girl whose name has disappeared to time. With a light grip on her shoulder, she was barely tamed at the age of five, the vitriol of a girl wronged boiling in her young blood. No more than a year older and his cruelty shone through like a wild beacon on a careless sea.

She grew up to loathe him. He was the favorite pupil out of nepotism, not of skill. Powerful and full of raw talent, he was nothing but a lightning storm, uncontrolled, untamed. She was mustered from a different crop—she did not learn easily, but she persevered to perfection. No matter her hours devoted, she could still never best him. And she loathed him for it.

“There’s truth in that old phrase,” he spit at her one evening, now twelve years old, robes dirtied with muck. His knee dug into her chest, pinning her losing streak down into the mud. “Maybe I am trying to get under your skin.”

Like a burr trapped in her hair or a thorn lodged into the soft flesh of her heel, he always managed to aggravate her. He snapped his teeth and mocked her delayed understanding of concepts that came to him like sleep. She grew tall; he grew taller.

Eighteen and mercilessly mischievous, there was a noticeable shift in his behavior, Before she found him a nuisance, an insect buzzing in her ear, but now he was ever-present like a thick fog. He could be called handsome, and she, rough on the edges. Battling for the right to be called promising had worn her rugged, her hands calloused and rough. His were smooth and elegant—he barely had to work for his prize.

A new movement caught in his step, the serpentine swagger of a predator. She’d heard whispers that he was changing in more than his looks, that the words from his mouth were now more in jest than in harm. He was a king of mockery and sarcasm, drawing chuckles from his insulted but impressed peers.

He forced her into a wall when she snuck out of her room one night, the mass of his body pinning her like a limp animal to cool stone. His eyes flickered—a hot flash of a violent yellow—before they settled into a muddled brown, a realization of recognition catching up with his reflexes. He cocked his head and the motion paralyzed her, scared her.

“Wouldn’t you say I’ve succeeded?”

He didn’t have to clarify—she knew which game they had played all these years. “Like spinose teeth around my neck.”

With a light touch, he drew a finger across the broad of her throat. She moved her head first, having anticipated this moment—this abhorrent, dreaded, exciting moment—for what felt like an endless stretch of time. If he indeed had fangs, he didn’t bite when their lips met.

He never bit unless asked.

Like the prickles on the citrus tree, he was lodged under the skin of her palms, her shins, her feet, as she tried to climb away from his influence. His voice was like a metronome, clicking to a calm, rhythmic time. It lulled her now, his words soft in her ears now that he had all he coveted.

It felt wrong, wandering in search of a lion in the dark. She never sought him out in the daylight for anything more than a verbal lashing. Her heart never ceased to stop when she rounded a dark corner to find him waiting. Good or bad, the adrenaline blurred her judgment. Electric fluttered on the skin he touched and it went straight to her brain.

Not long after the start of this sordid affair did he truly wedge himself under her skin. His tar-black hair twisted in her grip, she watched his exterior crack open to raw want. Her legs around his hips, the universe shattered under her that night. In the quiet air to follow, punctuated only by breath, she bore witness to the thoughts he bound deep inside his mind. They had a bond now, one that ran deeper than her body. She understood the fierce streaks of amber and canary that reflected from his eyes, the brewing tempest locked in the depths of his soul.

Her breath hitched, startled, and his hand caught her hip. “I can’t help it,” he admitted softly. “I don’t want it, I promise I don’t.”

“Why are those thoughts there, then?”

“I don’t know.” He pulled her closer, kissed her brow sweetly, and let out a tortured breath. “Please, believe me that I don’t know.”

They ate him away.

She watched him struggle through, from a conceited child to a well-meaning but blunt young adult, only to plummet down. The last time she could remember kissing him, he tasted of venom and bitterness. He’d grown like a tumor in her heart, out of place but part of her. Cutting him out of her entirely risked losing the organ itself.

Perhaps that’s why it stings so badly.

She stands before him now as a warrior clad in grey, a blade of blue quivering in her hands. His clothes are midnight black and his weapon redder than the heart that bleeds for him.

A shaky breath escapes her lungs like a plea. “I loved you, all those years ago.”

“You still do.” There’s dissonance in his voice; it clashes with the ruthlessness of his appearance. Remorse echoes like a siren song. “Or perhaps those feelings are mine.”

She never did cut the tumor out.

“I have no desire to fight this duel once more.” He disengages his saber, a small plea made with the shift of his weight. His shoulders roll back, no longer prepped for battle. “You should leave, before the circumstances change.”

“I can’t have one last dance?” Her lips twitch into a forlorn smile with the jest.

“Not tonight, love.”

It’s a careful touch, her bare fingers to the soft plane of his cheek. She’d gotten under his skin, too, had made a nest in his necrotic heart. Her lips are reluctant to leave his. Even after all the harm he has caused, all the darkness spread, he is still hers down to the bones.

She leaves with a wounded gaze, having gotten close enough to know a man different from the one cloaked before her in robes of black. He exists still, if only in the soft tissue of her beating heart. She carries him in her ribs, a part of him kept safe from the dark voices that stole his body in the night.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I am still on hiatus.  
> Did you know Cher was the first to perform Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)?   
> Because I didn't.


End file.
